One of Australia’s top music schools is in upheaval. Worsening debt and a very public fight over the direction of teaching has plunged the ANU School of Music into uncertainty and acrimony. Half the teaching staff will go. For some this is a battle between good and evil. For others it is an inevitable cultural shift, away from traditional classical music. Reporter: Di Martin. (Originally broadcast on 17th June 2012)

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Transcript

Jonathan Green:A brutal restructure at one of the country’s top music schools is being seen as a pivotal moment for music education in Australia. Di Martin has the inside story on upheaval and acrimony at the Australian National University’s School of Music in Canberra.

(Instruments being played)

Di Martin: Wandering down the corridors of one of Australia’s leading music schools, students are trying to practise for exams. But it’s a bit hard to concentrate with news of a restructure that could axe their degree and see their teachers sacked. The ANU has just confirmed it will halve the number of staff at its School of Music. Vernon Hill is a distinguished flautist and a senior member of staff.

Vernon Hill: In Canberra, we have produced players who have gone on to be principal players in orchestras, in big orchestras, throughout the world. The large… London Symphony, Berlin Phil, Hong Kong—the Canberra School of Music has been strong because it has had absolutely top teachers, top performers who are teachers. Once they are not here, why should people come?

Di Martin: The university will also radically alter the way the school teaches music. For the first time, one-on-one instrument or voice training will not be taught in a major music school. Instead, it’ll be outsourced. This is eminent composer, Larry Sitsky:

Larry Sitsky: I’ve been in tertiary education for over 50 years. I’m a foundation member of the school here and I must say this is the most barbarous thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Di Martin: The changes are part of a new curriculum, designed to deal with the school’s worsening debt. Jonathan Powles helped develop that curriculum. He says people may be unhappy, but the new course will cut costs and better prepare students for a tough music industry.

Jonathan Powles: There’s been a lot of upset. The people who think that it’s time for curriculum reform have been targeted by my other colleagues and, look, we urgently need to have the debate about what sort of music education prepares graduates for a changing musical environment. And it is changing.

Di Martin: I’m Di Martin. I live in Canberra, sing in a local choir, and know some of the personalities at the School of Music. This week the program takes you behind the scenes of this restructure. Background Briefing can reveal that the new curriculum is a much reduced and harsher version of a master plan that was already in place to turn around the school’s fortunes, a plan that the head of school, Adrian Walter, says would have taken only a few more years to achieve financial stability. Adrian Walter has now resigned, his school’s reputation in tatters. Anger and bitterness pervades the school, with some staff too frightened to speak publicly.

This is not just the story of a conservative university eating its most debt-ridden and vulnerable. It’s a more complex tale than that, about the federal government’s chronic underfunding of music, declining support for elite performance, and an evolving music industry—all of which has led to a heated and long-running debate in the tertiary music education sector about what music to teach, how to teach it and how to pay for it: a debate the ANU’s restructure has brought to a dramatic head; a restructure this program has been covering from the beginning.

It’s the morning of 3 May. Head of the ANU’s music school, Adrian Walter, walks out of the ANU chancellery on his way to deliver the grim news.

Adrian Walter, you need to explain to us what’s happening today.

Adrian Walter: Well, I’m about to meet with all our staff—our academic staff and administrative staff and venue staff—and also with our students, to explain some changes that we’re going to be posing for the ANU School of Music.

Di Martin: At this point, the changes are a closely guarded secret. But staff are dreading another round of cuts. Adrian Walter is a man under pressure.

Adrian Walter: Obviously I’m very concerned for my staff at the moment. I know it’s a very, very stressful time. They’re well aware that we have to make some significant changes, the way we do business, but that doesn’t make the process any easier. I suppose one of the good things about this process is that we believe we’ve got something unique and special we canoffer that actually positions us very strongly in the tertiary sector.

Di Martin: As it emerges later, Adrian Walter is referring to an entirely new curriculum he’s about to put to the meeting.

Adrian Walter: I’m hoping that staff will listen and we’ll listen to them as well. But also I suppose it’s giving them a chance to reflect and consider the paper that’s been put in front of them.

Di Martin: Adrian Walter walks into the school’s big band room with a near impossible task. He might have a proposed curriculum under his arm, but there’s an accompanying email from the vice-chancellor about reducing the school’s debt, an email that stuns the room. Details emerge as the meeting breaks up and blank-faced staff begin to spill outside. This is Alan Hicks, the school’s head of voice:

Alan Hicks: Look, I’ll quote from the vice-chancellor’s email: ‘To achieve this reduction, all academic and general staff positions in the School of Music will be declared vacant and applications invited for the new positions.’ Now…

Di Martin: How many new positions?

Alan Hicks: Ah, I think the number of 13 was mentioned.

Di Martin: And how many staff are there now?

Alan Hicks: I think the number 22.9 full-time…

Di Martin: …staff equivalent.

Alan Hicks: Equivalent, yep.

Di Martin: Half the staff are going to lose their jobs?

Alan Hicks: That’s right.

Di Martin: The 13 new positions are almost unrecognisable to shocked staff gathering in the wintry courtyard. The ANU won’t reemploy specialists in just instrument or voice; it wants people with a range of more vocational skills. This is soprano and voice lecturer Louise Page:

Louise Page: I think we’ve just witnessed the death of the school of music here and I’m just so sorry that the depth of talent that we have that’s been built up over 40 years here is just going to be obliterated, basically.

Di Martin: Louise Page says the proposed curriculum will savage performance teaching to make way for low-cost units, like theory and business skills, that can be taught in a class. The document wants to cut the amount of one-on-one teaching in half and no longer offer it within the school.

Louise Page: The one-on-one teaching looks like it’s going to suffer most of all, that we’ll be asked to teach in groups—that sort of thing—sort of to make us more financially viable. Now, for the voice department, for instance, there is already teaching out there in groups and it’s called a choir.

Di Martin: Will you reapply, or are these changes too much?

Louise Page: For me, I’ll have to talk to my husband, but I suspect not. I think I’d rather spend my last ten years performing or something like that rather than being part of a bureaucracy.

Di Martin: Staff feel like they’ve been put in an impossible position. At this stage, the curriculum is a proposal and the university wants staff feedback—but only after making clear it wants to sack half of them. Renowned percussionist, Gary France, echoes many of his colleagues’ growing anger.

Gary France: You know, you don’t find any common ground by putting everybody on the end of the gangplank, you know, with a knife at the back of ‘em and say, ‘OK, you’re going to walk the plank or we’re going to find common ground.’ This is the approach that the university’s taking. I’m dumbfounded by this approach.

Geoffrey Lancaster: Certainly we’re being told that the Australian National University within at least the discipline of music does want, ‘no high level specialist in one area.’ So I suppose it’s a case of we could have Surfboard Waxing 101, and Walnut Growing, maybe Pig Breeding with a little bit of amateur piano playing thrown in.

The issue I think now is, I’m putting out a call to the community here: really, listeners, you have to decide what is important to you. Is the furphy of the budget, budget, budget, budget, budget going to be the thing that worries you all your life, or are you concerned about the deepest part of your being, the beautiful, radiant, empowering moments that only the arts—and I should argue perhaps, maybe, that only music—can give you? Therefore, if you are concerned about this, you somehow need to make your feelings known. It’s time to galvanise. This is the moment.

Di Martin: And galvanise the community has.

(Sound from protest rally)

From a full-blown protest rally over-spilling the university’s Union Court to the efforts of a local community choir…

(Singing)

…changing the words to an iconic song in protest.

(Singing to music of the Hallelujah Chorus)

Protest has been swift and unrelenting, rocking the university: emails jamming the vice-chancellor’s inbox, a flood of letters to the editor, and local radio’s wall-to-wall coverage as the switchboards lit up on news of the cuts.

Genevieve Jacobs, ABC 666 Local Radio (archival): Hello, good afternoon, welcome to the program. And first up this hour on the show, the issue that’s right there at the top of the news headlines, too, this morning: the very significant cuts to the ANU’s School of Music. Thirty-two jobs are on the line…

Talkback caller (archival): Yes, I’ve got to… I was completely gobsmacked this morning when I heard about the School of Music thing. To hear they’re all sacked and have got to reapply for their jobs…

Genevieve Jacobs (archival): Via the SMS, Alison says: ‘A shortsighted bunch of bureaucrats. A world without music would be a sad and silent place and ANU has taken the easy target.’

Talkback caller (archival): And I’m wondering what message are we sending to young people today about the arts and about being creative and imaginative? It seems to me like everything has to come down to the dollar. If it makes a profit, it’s wonderful; if it runs at a loss, it’s not worth having.

(Music)

Di Martin: Even the local legislative assembly has officially condemned the changes.

John Hargreaves MLA (archival): I do not thank the ANU for this act of academic bastardry and musical cannibalism, because that’s exactly what it is. Mr Speaker, this is probably the most deplorable act that I have seen come out of the ANU since I got here in 1968.

Caroline Le Couteur MLA (archival): Well, then I’m very pleased that very shortly the whole assembly is going to vote to support the School of Music.

Stephen Rattenbury, Speaker (archival): The question now is the motion as amended be agreed to. Those of that opinion say aye (people say ‘aye’), the contrary nay. The ayes unanimously have it.

(Music)

Di Martin: The ANU’s vice-chancellor is Ian Young.

Ian Young: Oh, I expected lots of public reaction, because essentially the last two occasions on which there’s been an attempt to restructure the school, the public outcry has been such that there’ve only been quite minor changes. So we certainly knew that this was going to be a big issue. Did I think it would be quite as large as it has been? No, I didn’t.

Di Martin: Ian Young has held numerous senior academic posts around Australia and joined the ANU last year. Professor Young says the university cannot sustain the school’s annual $2.7 million debt.

Ian Young: People say to me, ‘Music’s important, doesn’t matter that it’s got a deficit, how dare you consider things like money in this. The university should simply fund it.’ But, the way money comes to the university for education programs is it actually comes on a per student basis. So if a program like music is costing much more than we receive—in this case it’s actually costing us almost twice as much as the money we receive—that’s got to come from somewhere. Now, there’s a level of cross-subsidy we can support, but when it gets to this level I’m having to go to students effectively in history or in English or in science and saying, ‘The HECS that you’re paying for your education is not being used to support you, it’s being used to support another program.’

Di Martin: But what Canberra’s music community sees is a university destroying a beloved school, a university that’s running a $14-million-a-year surplus. And many are angry about a recent university decision that blew out the school’s budget. Within the School of Music building is Canberra’s main concert hall. A couple of years ago, the school was forced to take over the hall’s $1-million-a-year running costs.

Director of the Canberra International Music Festival is Chris Latham. He says the school is a victim of unfair accounting. Chris Latham says a simple profit and loss approach fails time and again to recognise the real value of music education to society.

Chris Latham: It’s not about music; it’s about training the brain. Finland, for example—they have an emotional tie to music—decided that they were going to educate their musical population. So they subsidised music education across their population; now they’re one of the world leaders in design, architecture, and they are the world leader in wireless technology.

Music is probably the best system of brain training that exists. We certainly haven’t identified a better one yet. It uses the left and the right brain in sympathy, so both hemispheres have to work together. It produces incredibly high levels of teamwork; like, you can’t actually in the corporate world duplicate the outcomes we get in high-level music performance, where you get 30, 100 people—however many people are on stage—working together, all producing a very, very high outcome, and success is only achieved if everyone achieves it.

So a lot of these models are incredibly useful for the modern world, and yet somehow there’s never any value put towards, like, what the arts can actually contribute.

Di Martin: That’s Chris Latham, former violinist with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and highly respected music administrator.

(Music)

What’s happening at the ANU School of Music is just the latest episode in a campaign of cost-cutting and job losses across the tertiary sector. Schools of music are an obvious target because they’re expensive to run: high-quality instruments, specialised studios and small class to teacher ratios, including the lynchpin of music education, one master teacher working intensively with an individual student.

(Sound from one-on-one class)

Professor Geoffrey Lancaster performs internationally, has taught at major institutions around the world, and has been awarded an Order of Australia for service to music and music education.

Geoffrey Lancaster: I teach students how to play musical instruments, especially elite keyboard instrument players. I specialise in the piano and in the eighteenth-century piano and in the harpsichord, and my aim is to turn out virtuoso scholar musicians. Now, if you’re going to take up something difficult, don’t take up brain surgery, take up music, because in order to be a musician, like perhaps an elite sportsman, you have to have phenomenal fine motor control, you have to have an enormous amount of intelligence, you have to be able to create spontaneously and immediately on demand, you have to have massive levels of energy—it’s a very difficult thing to do.

Now, there is a system of teaching that was put in place after the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, that was predicated fundamentally on one-on-one teaching; that is, there is a student and a teacher in a room.

(Sound from one-on-one class)

If, for example, you’re teaching a student, one-on-one, and there’s no body language to tell you that that student has understood what you’ve said, you nevertheless know. And my feeling is that it has to do with spirit-to-spirit. I think this is a very… it’s a very intimate and deep connection between the gifted teacher and the student.

(Sound from one-on-one class)

You have to be incredibly sensitive to the student. There’s not one second of inattention that you can indulge in, whereas class teaching, which from the university point of view is considered to be more cost-effective, because you’ve got one person in front of 200 people, class situations can’t do that.

(Sound from one-on-one class)

Jonathan Powles: In effect, music schools—and it’s not just this one but all the music schools in this country, Europe and North America—are predicated on an educational model of how best to teach music that hasn’t really changed since the 1950s and in some ways hasn’t changed since the notion of the conservatoire first grew up in the late eighteenth century. Now, a whole lot of things have changed that mean it’s possible to do the job of teaching music students very differently.

Di Martin: Jonathan Powles is chair of the school’s education committee and helped write the new curriculum. It advocates more group classes, teaching via video conferencing, and the teaching of different styles of music—not just classical and jazz.

Jonathan Powles: I think it’s the best that we could possibly come up with, given the budget we have to work with. And so I’m quite excited about once all of the noise that we’re hearing at the moment, all of the knee-jerk, ‘Oh, this is the end of performance,’ that’s nonsense, ‘This is the end of one-to-one tuition,’ that’s not true either, ‘This is the end of music-making in the national capital’—these are just hysterical knee-jerk reactions to a curriculum that’s actually much more considered and much more interesting.

Di Martin: Jonathan Powles is not a popular man around the School of Music. For now, we’ll stay with him while he explains some of the changes and why he believes they’re needed, regardless of the size of the budget. Then we’ll hear some of the counterarguments. Here’s Jonathan Powles.

Jonathan Powles: Looking at how musicians are actually earning their living, there’s been quite a bit of substantial research that says nowadays they have what is called portfolio careers; that is, some of their income is generated by performance activities, typically in the community sector—so very, very fine pianists will graduate from music school and then they will earn a significant slice of their money, let’s say, accompanying community choirs, or playing for a bunch of flute students who are doing Grade 5 flute exams, and so on.

Di Martin: Jonathan Powles says graduates will also have to teach music to others to augment their income and they’ll need to know how to write a grant application to access private and public funding.

Jonathan Powles: To some extent you have to be an entrepreneur; you have to manage your own publicity, you have to manage your own business if you’re a self-employed musician. And again, there are many examples of musicians benefitting from those skills.

Di Martin: Jonathan Powles says the new curriculum is designed specifically on preparing students for a portfolio career rather than a career on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. He agrees the change will come at the expense of elite performance training, but he says positions in orchestras and other elite-level opportunities are becoming fewer, and Jonathan Powles says different skills are needed to survive in today’s music industry, including the skills to break into music-making’s fastest growing sector.

Jonathan Powles: Music and the internet, music and computer games, music and a whole variety of information and communication technologies, it’s where the money is, it’s where the money is and increasingly the innovation is. Nowadays the release of a new computer game—the one I’m thinking of came out late last year, Skyrim…

(Music from game soundtrack)

It was a huge thing and it involved television advertisements, like the release of a blockbuster movie. The attention given to the music that supports the game is equally as exhaustive, equally highly skilled, equally remunerative if you happen to be lucky enough to be involved in the production of the score for a computer game like Skyrim or some of those other ones that get launched with a great fanfare. If you can’t work in that technologically informed environment, you’re missing out on opportunities now. And that goes as much for someone whose primary activity is a concert violinist as it is for someone whose a music technology specialist.

Di Martin: Jonathan Powles says the school’s one-on-one teaching is generally associated with developing elite-level skills in classical music. He says the plan to outsource this type of teaching reflects not only the new budget but also changing social attitudes.

Jonathan Powles: This is the fourth or fifth financial crisis the school has been in since about 2000. And I think that reflects a deeper crisis of classical music and its role in society. I think some of the noise you’re hearing in the community, the enormous outbursts of angst—the letters to the editor, the letters to the vice-chancellor, the opinion pieces—almost represent this as the end of western civilisation. And you know, in some ways it is; in some ways it’s the end of that civilised privileged and elite place that music has in western civilisation in the last couple of hundred years.

(Music)

Chris Latham: Well, ‘classical’ is a very, very loaded word.

Di Martin: Director of the Canberra International Music Festival, Chris Latham, says getting the best performance skills you can is not about classical music.

Chris Latham: The reality is, in-depth instrumental training produces people who can do an awful lot of things.

Di Martin: He says School of Music staff and students who perform in the festival demonstrate a wide range of skills, built on the foundations of intense elite-level performance training.

Chris Latham: In this festival, for example, we played Turkish music, we played microtonal music, we played period music that was historically informed and we played classical contemporary music and a lot of other things. Some of the musicians were playing a whole bunch of things that would sound to me to be folk music, but they’re put through a different prism. It just gives you an extraordinary skill base that you can do different things with in the future. So this whole idea that we’re training people for single genres is over.

Di Martin: Chris Latham has no problem with teaching vocational skills, as long as it’s not at the expense of performance training.

Chris Latham: The new degree program is a good degree program. It absolutely should be used; it was always supposed to be one of the solutions to make sure that the instrumental teaching could be sustained, and that was to have a more commercial underpinning. Like, the point was just not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Di Martin: The university insists that the curriculum still has a strong emphasis on performance skills. Students will be given an allowance that can be used to access private one-on-one teaching. And they can choose teachers in different styles of music, not only classical or jazz. But Chris Latham says Canberra now has some of the best classical and jazz teachers in the country. If they lose their job at the school, there’s not many other opportunities that will keep them in this little inland city. Festival director, Chris Latham:

Chris Latham: There’s a notable cellist in town, probably the best in Australia, who took redundancy previously, in the last round, who now lives in town and has young children and chooses to. And he works sessionally and he works just for a little over what you’d get on the dole, OK? So you can’t expect people to stay for that level of compensation, given that most of these people are amongst the best practitioners in the country in their field. They won’t.

Di Martin: Have you heard that teachers want to leave Canberra and so will not be available to teach under the bursary system?

Chris Latham: Yeah, I know exactly who will be leaving and I could list their names and they will be moving out quite fast—second semester, probably.

(Music)

Di Martin: Just a week-and-a-half after the changes were announced, a cartoon appeared in the Canberra Times. Vice-chancellor Ian Young sits on a snowy battlefield, dressed as Napoleon. There’s a trombone slider around his neck, a violin bow through his hat and a dead horse lying beside him. A journal in his lap reads, ‘Day 11: The march on the School of Music is progressing so well, I have agreed to eat my warhorse.’

It was printed on the day of one of the biggest protests in the ANU’s history.

(Sound from protest)

A thousand protestors sang, played and danced for an hour, before speeches and a march on the chancellery.

(Sound from protest)

You can check pictures of the day on Background Briefing’s website. The rally followed a concert where students and staff played continuously for 24 hours, right through a bitter Canberra night when the mercury hit minus-3. Internationally renowned harpist Alice Giles was one of the performers.

Alice Giles: Yeah, well we’re in front of the School of Music and it’s a really vibrant, lively scene. The kids have been playing music all night, since midday yesterday, and it’s been non-stop program and the staff have just finished playing a little bit; and everyone’s milling around, gathering together now for the rally.

And I think what it shows is what a successful school we have. The students are just amazing the way they’ve pulled together. They have all the skills they need to go out there in the profession; they haven’t just been sitting in their practice rooms—obviously—because they really know how to communicate, they know how to get together, how to project out into the community. These are all the things that we’ve actually been teaching them all this time. So it’s no good telling us we haven’t.

(Comic routine)

There’s the trumpet serenaders and the opera singers too

And the harpsichordists

Struth we’ve got them on the list

And all guitarists, jazz trombonists, violin players who,

Should be economists, you should be economists.

Then the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tones

All centuries but this one, and every uni but his own.

We know that there are music students walking out the door

Because we don’t have teachers here to teach them any more.

But what the heck, they’re students, so they’re either stoned or pissed

Then none of them be missed

We know they won’t be missed

Hannah Murray: I’ve decided to transfer at the end of this semester to Newcastle University.

Di Martin: French horn player, Hannah Murray, is the first to announce she’s leaving.

Hannah Murray: There’s been talk amongst quite a few students of moving to universities like Monash and UQ and Sydney, even. People are extremely upset. It’s not just a case of students getting all uppity about proposed changes; it’s a case of this is our career, this is what we’ve chosen to do with our lives. And to have it taken out from under us here—where we chose to come—like, a lot of us have travelled from different states; some of us have travelled from different countries to be here, to learn from the best, because here we have the best.

Student: John Mackey, Miroslav, Eric Ajaye…

Student: …high quality of teachers, high quality of students. Only reason I came.

Di Martin: What kind of impact do you think it’s going to have on students looking at…

Student: Enormous influence. I know of people that would consider coming here and if they knew of these changes, no way—from a performance perspective. People that came here that wanted to be a performer will no longer come here. I don’t think… I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t if I was applying next year and I heard these changes were being implemented. No way—wouldn’t even bother applying.

Di Martin: The university says it expects current students will not support the new curriculum and that it will appeal to a different type of student. But the problem is choice of music school has long been dictated by where you can access the best teacher. It will take some time for that expectation to change. This is the school’s head of voice, Alan Hicks:

Alan Hicks: I would suggest that our applicants for 2013 commencement will have already been trashed by these announcements. It’s very easy to put someone off a place and it’s very difficult to change their mind if they think something negative about it.

Di Martin: Alan Hicks says the restructure has been poorly managed, alienating staff from the outset. He’s particularly disappointed about the lack of consultation. Alan Hicks says staff have worked hard on keeping the curriculum relevant to prepare students for a changed music industry.

Alan Hicks: I think those things are already happening within our courses. We can do more to help, particularly to help performers learn how to write grant applications, but there’s no point writing a grant application if you can’t actually doanything apart from write grant applications.

Di Martin: So what would you do if you were over in the chancellery? You’re looking at a school that’s haemorrhaging money, what do you do?

Alan Hicks: If I were looking at a school that’s haemorrhaging money—and we hear different takes on what the financial situation is—but if I were looking at a school that’s haemorrhaging money, I’d be looking to keep what’s quality about it. I’d be looking for the very best teaching and I’d be asking those people what’s so successful about what you do. Our performance courses outrank most of the courses in the university in terms of student satisfaction. Suddenly, that’s worthless to the university, suddenly they need new models, suddenly it’s broken.

I have worked really hard here for eight years. I’ve never been treated like this in any institution in my life.

(Discordant music)

Alan Hicks: There are so many damaged people wandering around this building—staff, students—and it’s very difficult to come face-to-face with that. I don’t know if healing is possible. You hope and pray that it would be, but when so much has been done in secret, so much has been done without consultation, so much has just been prepared in the background by individuals and is against and so disrespectful and devaluing of what people have put their heart and soul into, how could they do that to us?

(Discordant music)

Jonathan Powles: You ask me about the abuse that I’ve been receiving, I mean I… All I have been doing is fighting as hard as possible to keep music in some form alive at this university, because I can see a real possibility, if the black and white nature of this argument continues, that we will lose music at the ANU, and that would be an absolute, absolute disaster.

(Discordant music)

Geoffrey Lancaster: Obviously it’s a situation, I would suggest, where you either adopt this putrid little pathetic course, that you allow us to decimate the staff of master teacher instrumental specialists and aural specialists, it’s either that or we shut you down.

(Discordant music)

Jonathan Powles: I think it’s just sad to see people hurling vitriol like… the worst I’ve had is being compared to a paedophile, having the same level of moral standing and deserving to be treated in the same way.

(Discordant music)

Geoffrey Lancaster: The issue of a paedophile is being used as an analogy for the notion of the influence and the presence in a community of something that is destructive for that community, of something that is not healthy.

Di Martin: The human fallout from this restructure has been profound. At her home in North Canberra, this is composer and musicologist Dr Ruth Lee Martin:

Ruth Lee Martin: In all honesty, I found it quite shocking the day that we were give the piece of paper to say that our positions were to be made vacant. And seeing the impact on many of the staff members at the School of Music has been really awful to see.

Di Martin: Ruth Martin says staff have been under terrible pressure for years. She says the job cuts and the new curriculum’s approach to one-on-one teaching has made people particularly angry. Ruth Martin is disappointed an opportunity to discuss broadening the curriculum has been lost in the extent of cuts and the fury of the debate.

Ruth Lee Martin: Well, I think one-to-one teaching is really, really important. I’ve never been against one-to-one teaching. I’d also like to see an extension of that. I’d like to see the chance of other types of performance at a very high level; for example, in pop music. If they need some training to get them to a higher level, why don’t we offer it?

The same with traditional performing: to get people to the very highest levels, why does it have to be just classical music? Why can’t we get people to the highest levels in all kinds of music?

Di Martin: By speaking out in favour of even modest change, Ruth Martin has come under fierce attack, to the point she wavered before agreeing to speak to Background Briefing.

Ruth Lee Martin: Yes, it’s been impossible to have any meaningful debate. If anybody tries to open their mouths to give an opinion which might in any way differ from the majority, they’re publicly vilified and that really has amazed me.

Di Martin: Ruth Martin tells of an online debate she had in the days following the announced changes. It was in the comments section of an ABC Limelight magazine article.

Ruth Lee Martin: So we’re having a really good debate and then an ex-student, who decided to… didn’t like my opinion, began to vilify me personally, which I actually found really shocking. And then other comments began and then I realised that if I was going to try and say anything, I was going to be publicly vilified and I’m just… I’m not prepared for that to happen. So I asked them to take my post down.

But that hasn’t been the end of it, because, somebody copied the post and have been posting the original blog I made under Facebook websites under a false name that purports to come from me. So, like, it’s just really, really vindictive. I am amazed by the vindictiveness of this campaign. Why do we need to shut down debate? Why can’t we have a good, honest, open debate about these things? They’re really important as we move forward; I really think they are.

Di Martin: Can I ask you how this has impacted on you personally?

Ruth Lee Martin: Oh, just incredibly stressful—unbelievably stressful—to the point that it’s starting to make me physically ill.

Radio announcer (archival): And you’re on 666 ABC Canberra. Time now for the news headlines. Good afternoon to Julian Abbott.

Julian Abbott (archival): Thank you. The head of the ANU School of Music, Adrian Walter, has taken leave just days after the announcement of a controversial restructure of the school. All 32 positions will be spilled, with staff invited to reapply…

Di Martin: Of all the casualties of this restructure, Adrian Walter is perhaps the most notable. He came under immense pressure in the wake of the changes. Less than a week after the announcement, Professor Walter suddenly took leave, but it was not to potter around his garden, as this media release from Hong Kong makes clear:

Di Martin: Adrian Walter had used his leave to fly to Hong Kong and accept another job. On his return, he spoke to Background Briefing.

Adrian Walter: I was well aware that I was going to step back into a lot of criticism, that there would be a lot of misunderstanding about why I’d done what I’d done, there’d be a lot of discussion about I was just abandoning ship. And quite the contrary: I could have done…

Di Martin: Adrian Walter insists he was not secretly planning to parachute to safety if the restructure went bad, that he’d been approached by a recruitment company earlier this year and the job offer came up just as the school’s new curriculum was revealed. But Professor Walter was also deeply angry. While he supported curriculum change, he never supported the dramatic cuts to the school and lobbied fiercely against them.

He also felt betrayed by the university. Adrian Walter was employed three years ago to introduce change. The university had then agreed to his more gradual rescue plan. That plan was in train, moving the school towards more vocational and cheaper subjects that would help pay for the more expensive performance units. Adrian Walter believes his plan would have borne fruit in just another couple of years. Instead, the university opted to target performance in the new curriculum.

Adrian Walter: It’s not any longer geared towards just the training of elite performers. In actual fact, they probably won’t do that at all; that’s not the market it’s engaging with. The original model we had was a model that three to five years time you would have a rather large, broad-based degree looking at training students in a whole range of professional career destinations alongside an elite performance stream, that the students that got into an elite stream were the ones that really had the capacity to go on to elite careers—you could even tighten that up—while you allowed the other area to grow so you amortise the costs. And that was a model that had been supported by the university and been rolled out and was on its way.

Di Martin: The university now says a worsening economic climate means a different approach is needed. Adrian Walter now questions the university’s change process and he acknowledges staff have been put in an impossible position, being invited for their thoughts on the new curriculum after being told they might be sacked.

Adrian Walter: Well, I think this is… a number of staff obviously have said that, and I think that probably will be something that will give the university cause for reflection on how they might progress with this whole proposal.

Di Martin: Professor Adrian Walter officially left the school this week. Over at chancellery, the actions of its handpicked school head have created a PR nightmare. This is Ian Young, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University:

Ian Young: Adrian obviously was looking at positions before this process. He also came under enormous pressure during the process as well, so he needed to make decisions himself as to what he saw as being his best career moves in the future.

Di Martin: It’s a strong indication, isn’t it, to the community that this process has been poorly managed.

Ian Young: I think what it says is how difficult it is. This is an emotion-charged process.

Di Martin: Professor Young grows angry at suggestions the university has deliberately white-anted the school over time.

Ian Young: Change is always difficult and change which involves emotive things is very difficult. We believe, and the reason that we’re doing this is we believe it’s important for ANU to retain music. I mean people have said ‘all they want to do is close it’; well, if I wanted to close it I would close it. There are much easier things to do than this.

Di Martin: The reputation of the ANU and Ian Young have come in for a sustained beating, especially in the local Canberra community. Nearly 25,000 people have signed a petition condemning the cuts, which is partly why, two weeks after the announcements, the ANU went to great lengths to broker a deal, a deal with a prominent local businessperson to raise extra funds for the school. The university had initially proposed halving the amount of one-on-one teaching.

Ian Young: If we could raise, say, $2-million—which is not a huge sum—that would actually allow us to be able to deliver one hour of one-to-one tuition per week, which is what the students currently get in their degree.

Di Martin: And how much has been committed so far?

Ian Young: We don’t have firm commitments on the table at this stage.

Di Martin: Regardless of the amount raised, the university has committed to restoring the amount of one-on-one teaching that students can access.

But School of Music staff say it changes very little. Half the teaching staff will still be sacked and that one-on-one teaching will still be outsourced, leaving open the question of the quality of teaching available in the local community.

Even though this restructure has variously been described as brutal and inhumane, ANU vice-chancellor Ian Young says there was no other way of doing it.

Ian Young: If you’re looking at what is required here, which is a significant change to the curriculum and therefore a significant change to the cohort of people who teach that and indeed the skills of the people who teach that, it’s major organisational change. You need to do that in a very formal way which is specified by our enterprise agreement.

Di Martin: Ian Young says even if he’d first consulted with staff, the storm over the changes would have been as intense.

Ian Young: And it wouldn’t matter whether you did that in a formal way, as we have, or indeed if I strolled into the coffee room one day at the School of Music and started talking to people about this. If I’d done that it would immediately have gone public as well. So it doesn’t… I’ve looked at the process many, many times and I think in something which is so emotion-charged as this, which actually is impregnated in all elements of the community, it seems, I don’t see any other way of doing this.

Di Martin: That’s Ian Young. All music included in today’s program includes or is solely the work of staff and students at the School of Music, including this performance from Geoffrey Lancaster:

Geoffrey Lancaster: (Introducing performance) This is a piece about a man who is a lute player at the court of Louis XIV. The court of Louis XIV was particularly corrupt, spiritually. After a séance this man was found at the bottom of a staircase with his neck broken, which of course has to do really with the notion of evil in terms of absolutes. So fundamentally I’m going to play you a piece which is a tombeau. This is a lament; it’s in the memory of a great person, and in this case it’s a lament offered to you in memory of a great institution and in memory of the cultural richness that Canberra has had because of its presence and the cultural richness which Canberra will not have from now on.

(Geoffrey Lancaster plays)

Jonathan Green: A lament, performed by Geoffrey Lancaster of the ANU’s School of Music. And the reporter for Background Briefing was Di Martin. The coordinating producer was Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Louis Mitchell and the executive producer was Chris Bullock.